An epistolary novel is a novel written as a series of letters between the fictional characters of a narrative. The term is often extended to cover novels that intersperse documents of other kinds with the letters, most commonly diary entries and newspaper clippings, and sometimes considered to include novels composed of documents even if they do not include letters at all. More recently, epistolaries may include electronic documents such as recordings and radio, blog posts, and e-mails. The word epistolary is derived from Latin from the Greek word ἐπιστολή, epistolē, meaning a letter (see epistle). This type of fiction is also sometimes known by the German term Briefroman or more generally as epistolary fiction.
Ringgold Wilmer Lardner was an American sports columnist and short story writer best known for his satirical writings on sports, marriage, and the theatre. His contemporaries Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, and F. Scott Fitzgerald all professed strong admiration for his writing, and author John O'Hara directly attributed his understanding of dialogue to him.
The New Yorker is an American weekly magazine featuring journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry. Founded as a weekly in 1925, the magazine is published 47 times annually, with five of these issues covering two-week spans. Although its reviews and events listings often focus on the cultural life of New York City, The New Yorker has a wide audience outside New York and is read internationally.
Mary Flannery O'Connor was an American novelist, short story writer and essayist. She wrote two novels and 31 short stories, as well as a number of reviews and commentaries.
Rodgers and Hart were an American songwriting partnership between composer Richard Rodgers (1902–1979) and the lyricist Lorenz Hart (1895–1943). They worked together on 28 stage musicals and more than 500 songs from 1919 until Hart's death in 1943.
John Henry O'Hara was one of America's most prolific writers of short stories, credited with helping to invent The New Yorker magazine short story style. He became a best-selling novelist before the age of 30 with Appointment in Samarra and BUtterfield 8. While O'Hara's legacy as a writer is debated, his champions rank him highly among the under-appreciated and unjustly neglected major American writers of the 20th century. Few college students educated after O'Hara's death in 1970 have discovered him, chiefly because he refused to allow his work to be reprinted in anthologies used to teach literature at the college level.
Edmund Wilson Jr. was an American writer, literary critic and journalist. He is widely regarded as one of the most important literary critics of the 20th century. Wilson began his career as a journalist, writing for publications such as Vanity Fair and The New Yorker. He helped to edit The New Republic, served as chief book critic for The New Yorker, and was a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. Wilson was the author of more than twenty books, including Axel's Castle, Patriotic Gore, and a work of fiction, Memoirs of Hecate County. He was a friend of many notable figures of the time, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and John Dos Passos. His scheme for a Library of America series of national classic works came to fruition through the efforts of Jason Epstein after Wilson's death. He was a two-time winner of the National Book Award and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964.
Ted Chiang is an American science fiction writer. His work has won four Nebula awards, four Hugo awards, the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and six Locus awards. His short story "Story of Your Life" was the basis of the film Arrival (2016). He was an artist in residence at the University of Notre Dame in 2020–2021. Chiang is also a frequent non-fiction contributor to the New Yorker Magazine, most recently on topics related to computer technology, such as artificial intelligence.
Anne Tyler is an American novelist, short story writer, and literary critic. She has published twenty-four novels, including Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982), The Accidental Tourist (1985), and Breathing Lessons (1988). All three were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and Breathing Lessons won the prize in 1989. She has also won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, the Ambassador Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2012 she was awarded The Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence. Tyler's twentieth novel, A Spool of Blue Thread, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2015, and Redhead By the Side of the Road was longlisted for the same award in 2020.
"The Lottery" is a short story by Shirley Jackson that was first published in The New Yorker on June 26, 1948. The story describes a fictional small American community which observes an annual tradition known as "the lottery", in which a member of the community is selected by chance and stoned to death to ensure a good harvest and purge the town of bad omens. The lottery, its preparations, and its execution are all described in detail, though what actually happens to the selected person is not revealed until the end.
William Keepers Maxwell Jr. was an American editor, novelist, short story writer, essayist, children's author, and memoirist. He served as a fiction editor at The New Yorker from 1936 to 1975. An editor devoted to his writers, Maxwell became a mentor and confidant to many authors.
Pal Joey is a 1940 musical with a book by John O'Hara and music and lyrics by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart. The musical is based on a character and situations O'Hara created in a series of short stories published in The New Yorker, which he later published in novel form. The title character, Joey Evans, is a manipulative small-time nightclub performer whose ambitions lead him into an affair with the wealthy, middle-aged and married Vera Simpson. It includes two songs that have become standards: "I Could Write a Book" and "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered".
Pal Joey is a 1957 American musical comedy film directed by George Sidney, loosely adapted from the Rodgers and Hart musical play of the same name, and starring Rita Hayworth, Frank Sinatra, and Kim Novak.
Yiyun Li is a Chinese-born writer and professor in the United States. Her short stories and novels have won several awards, including the PEN/Hemingway Award and Guardian First Book Award for A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, and the 2020 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award for Where Reasons End. She is an editor of the Brooklyn-based literary magazine A Public Space.
"The Enormous Radio" is a short story by American author John Cheever. It first appeared in the May 17, 1947, issue of The New Yorker, and was subsequently collected in The Enormous Radio and Other Stories., 55 Short Stories from the New Yorker, and The Stories of John Cheever.
About Chekhov is a book of memoirs by Nobel Prize-winning Russian author Ivan Bunin, devoted to Anton Chekhov, his friend and major influence. Bunin started working on the book in the late 1940s in France. It remained unfinished, and was completed by the writer's widow Vera Muromtseva, and came out posthumously in New York City, in 1955. Translated by Thomas Gaiton Marullo, the book was published in English in 2007, under the title About Chekhov. The Unfinished Symphony.
Angelica Gibbs was an American writer of short stories and contributions to magazines like The New Yorker. She was born in Baltimore, Maryland.
The Way Some People Live is a collection of 30 works of short fiction by John Cheever, published in 1943 by Random House.
The World of Apples is the sixth collection of short fiction by author John Cheever, published in 1973 by Alfred A. Knopf. The ten stories originally appeared individually in The New Yorker, Esquire, The Saturday Evening Post or Playboy.
